Tafsir of Al-Hijr 15:62

He (the messenger) said: "Indeed, you are people [who are] strangers [to me]."

He said this after having endured both this and that, when all stratagems were exhausted and all reasons were confounded, and when he did not perceive from the messengers—at the time of suffering hardships and enduring the schemes of his people who intended toward them what they intended—the assistance and reinforcement that are customary and habitual in what they do and leave behind when he burdened himself with their deliverance. It was a reproach for their abandonment and their leaving him without support in the state of distress that befell him on their account, for they were not directly with him in the matters of defense and resistance, until it forced him to say: "If only I had strength against you or could take refuge in a powerful pillar," as has been detailed in Surat Hud. It is not that he said it at the beginning of their arrival to him in the sense of: "You are people whom my soul does not recognize and is repulsed by, so I fear you might harm me," as has been said. How could that be, when they had surrounded them, as narrated by His, the Glorified's, statement: "And the people of the city came, rejoicing."